


What You Can't Bury

by DetectiveJoan



Category: The Bright Sessions (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Episode: 40 Safe House Part II, Gen, Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-16
Updated: 2018-03-16
Packaged: 2019-04-01 06:27:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13992405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DetectiveJoan/pseuds/DetectiveJoan
Summary: All else being equal, there’s a man dying on the couch.Mark wipes his hands on his jeans to avoid getting too much of Damien’s blood on the phone, and then dials 911.(Canon divergence set after season 3/Safe House)





	What You Can't Bury

**Author's Note:**

> This is semi-dark fic and I'm deliberately not putting any kind of detailed content warnings here. Proceed accordingly. 
> 
> Title from "[November](http://detectivejoan.tumblr.com/post/171903868279/kill-what-you-cant-save-what-you-cant-eat-throw)" by Margaret Atwood. 
> 
> _Kill what you can't save_  
>  _What you can't eat throw out_  
>  _What you can't throw out bury_

All else being equal, there’s a man dying on the couch.

Mark wipes his hands on his jeans to avoid getting too much of Damien’s blood on the phone, and then dials 911.

Mark had paid his rent in college working graves as a dispatch operator, and now his mouth rolls out phrases like “physical assault” and “multiple lacerations” and “male assailant” on autopilot, because the stuffy jargon is easier to say than something like “Caleb used my fury to beat the shit out of him, so it’s really all my fault, and I hate him but I can’t let him _die.”_

(They used to called this stretch of weeks between Halloween and New Year’s “suicide season” because of the huge spike in self-harm emergency calls during the holidays, and he can’t stop looking at the bruises blossoming up Damien’s face and wondering if he’d known this was a possible outcome. Probably not. Suicide by having your face caved in wasn’t exactly Damien’s style.)

The paramedics from the first ambulance brace Damien’s neck, take his vitals, and make grim faces while paramedics from the second ambulance press a cold compress to Chloe’s growing goose-egg and try to convince her to go in for an MRI.

The first cop car shows up while they’re moving Damien to the gurney, and Mark watches Adam’s fingernails gouge into Caleb’s arm as his grip tightens unconsciously.

Mark gets into the ambulance with Damien despite Sam’s protests and Joan’s look of consternation, so he’s not around to see the remaining paramedics wrapping Caleb’s split knuckles properly, or Joan telling off the cops for trying to question Adam without his guardians present, or Frank volunteering information on the earlier assault at the office.

He doesn’t see Caleb get pushed into the back of the police car, no it’s procedure, ma’am, we have to take him in, we’ll get in contact with his parents, don’t worry.

He doesn’t hear Sam frantically assure Caleb that she’ll jump back five minutes and get in the cruiser with him and be beside him the whole time.

What Mark does hear is Damien’s heart stop when they’re still half a mile out from the nearest hospital, and he watches them end resuscitation attempts in the E.R. ten minutes later, and he really doesn’t need to know anything else to know that he fucked up.

When a nurse asks if he’s family, Mark is still too shell-shocked to come up with a good lie, so the body gets whisked away and he’s not allowed to know where to.

(Mark had watched Camille die two years ago, but also two hundred years ago, unable to touch her as she suddenly collapsed to the ground and started gasping in pain. She’d faded away a bit, gone translucent before she stopped breathing, somehow became cold and stiff despite the fact that in that dimension she only existed as an apparition. This might be worse.)

The AM plucks Caleb out of jail the next morning. Frank had kept Chloe home, but Sam hadn’t come back from her trip to do the same to Mark, so he’s slouched in some waiting room with Joan and Adam. Caleb’s parents are off in a private office, where the privilege of kinship means they get to hear a story about how much the AM really will help their son learn to control his ability and avoid this kind of trouble in the future. The rest of them get Agent Green explaining that no matter the circumstances, Caleb was uncontrollably violent and he needs to be restrained for the good of society or what the fuck ever.

“He killed a man,” Green says, as if they could have forgotten.

“He killed Damien,” Joanie says, as if that’s different.

Adam is surprised in a way Mark wishes he could still be. Shocked. At a loss for words. Flabbergasted at the news that his boyfriend is getting disappeared for trying to protect him.

Joan is calm, cool in a way that might mean she’s already devising a solution but also might mean she’s recognized an unwinnable battle.

Damien is dead and Caleb is gone and Sam is who knows where.

(There’s an anger burning all across Mark’s ribs that he remembers feeling when they first took him, but stronger now for all the years it’s been stoked.)

Green does, genuinely, look sorry.

Mark takes a shot at breaking his nose; Joan catches his wrist and drags him outside before he can see the results of the first hit or take a second swing.

“I’ll fucking kill him,” Mark declares, voice hoarse, perhaps more loudly than one should yell threats while standing five feet outside the city jail, but there’s no one out here to take him seriously. No one but Joan. “Them. All of them. Every one of those bastards. They can’t have him.”

“No, Mark, you need to —”

“They _can’t,_ Joanie, they can’t get away with this.” And it’s not anything to do with Caleb, really, and nothing to do with Damien at all, but Mark’s suddenly crushed by the experience of being on this end of it, of hearing nice lies and platitudes to explain away the fact that Wadsworth gets to pick out any atypical she feels like and keep them for as long as she likes. Gets to kill them if she so chooses. He’s sick with it.

“They won’t,” Adam says, quiet but firm. Mark hadn’t even realized he’d followed them outside. “But we have to be smart.”

(Mark had smoked for a bit in college because he thought being a photography major at an art school gave him licence to be a pretentious asshole. He’d stopped, because he met a cute boy who told him off for being a pretentious asshole and who wouldn’t kiss him if he tasted like smoke, but he picks it up again. Sam doesn’t complain because she’s still on her trip.)

Adam gets in touch with a journalist. Chloe’s head is still foggy, but when Mark stands next to her he can read the dude’s mind well enough to convince him that their whole bullshit superpower story might not actually be bullshit all the way through.

He whistles long and low and impressed when Adam lays out what happened to Caleb, and then he admits that this is way above his pay grade. “You’ve gotta talk to a national paper,” he says. “If you can verify any of this, it’s front page New York Times shit.”

(“You know they’ll probably arrest your parents, right? If what they did to Frank and the others gets out?” Mark tells Adam while they’re hunched against the cold on the front steps of the Hayes house. Mark’s deliberately inhaling cancer because the curl of it in his mouth feels inexplicably comfortable.

Adam coughs at the smoke.)

NPR sends a woman with a buzz cut and practical shoes. “We’ve been sitting on this for awhile,” she says, leaning back in her chair and uncapping her pen even though no one’s said anything worth noting. “Atypicals, I mean. Not your branch of the AM. Not that Wadsworth isn’t a piece of work, from what I’ve heard, but she’s thorough. Haven’t been able to find a lot of people who made it out of her place, and none of them were ever willing to talk.”

So that’s how Mark finally tells his story, beginning to end: sitting in her fancy hotel room that for all the money in the world still feels exactly like the ragged motels Damien dragged him through last summer. She takes Frank’s story fist, because the only survivor of a dangerous military experiment will definitely make better copy. But after that it’s just Mark and this journalist who’s married to a telepath.

There’s bottled water from the mini fridge that tastes like rocks, and not in the good way that marketing is always trying to convince you rocks taste. It just makes his mouth feel more dry.

He lays it all out, abuse after abuse after abuse, until they’re blurring together and he has to sketch out a timeline of the experiments on a legal pad. She never looks surprised, or even skeptical, but her eyes get tighter and tighter as he goes on.

“And you think they’re doing something like this to the Michaels kid?” she asks when Mark reaches Camille’s death and his throat starts closing up around the words. It’s not the end, but it’s a stopping point, a place where the story shifts.

He can’t answer.

She sighs. “I can’t get him out. Publishing this will put the pressure on, but what you’re really going to need is a lawyer."

(Sam finally rematerializes and confirms what Mark already knew in the back of his throat about where they’ve put Caleb, and then she sleeps for thirteen hours straight. Apparently she has to expend a lot of energy to take a long enough trip into the near enough past that she crosses over into the present. Good to know.)

The journalist puts them in touch with some J.D. she knows with a practice in Virginia and a record of winning civil rights cases. That’s technically what this is. Unlawful arrest and detention by a para-governmental organization. Something something habeas corpus.

(A history teacher had once told Mark that the phrase literally translated to “produce the corpse.”)

(This isn’t about Damien, but the AM did take his body from the hospital mortuary. Not that Mark wants a funeral. Not that he could afford a burial anyway.)

It really does make a good news story. Not only the reveal of super humans walking amongst us, but a nefarious government organization experimenting on them, a handsome football star to center the narrative, and a whip smart boyfriend to personalize the whole thing. Adam starts reciting the sob story in front of any news camera that will point at him long enough to record it.

It’s still reading season, but someone at Yale admissions figures out that they have an application from Adam, and it must be pretty good because they post a statement of support for him across their social media profiles. Twitter has a field day with it.

There are morons in Congress — _please let them just be morons, please let them not have had an actual hand in any of this_ — who argue that Caleb obviously deserves whatever is happening to him. Whether they believe he’s being punished by a just Government or a just God isn’t exactly clear, but it makes Mark’s teeth ache all the same.

It doesn’t matter in the end. The judge agrees with Adam’s expensive lawyer that the detention is unlawful, and she orders Caleb’s release.

They have to bring in the goddamn National Guard to raid the facility, seeing as the local cops are the ones who let Caleb slide into the AM’s hands in the first place.

(Mark knows he looked like shit when he finally got home. He’d slunk into Joan’s office with her address scrawled on a ripped phone book page sticking out of his front pocket, his hair five years too long, his shirt loose in a way that somehow emphasized how tight his skin was against his ribs. And even that was three months better than he’d looked when Damien had hauled him out of the AM. At least his hair had been washed. At least he’d been able to walk.)

It’s been a matter of weeks, not years, but Mark is somehow still expecting Caleb to come out emaciated.

He doesn’t recognize any of the other liberated atypical detainees; like that journalist said, Wadsworth was thorough. It’s not exactly a surprise that no one else he met down there made it out alive.

(They don’t find any bodies.)

(Sam complains about the smoke.)

They hold a press conference when Caleb’s finally cleared to go home. Mark could never get used to being recorded, but Caleb barely falters. It’s possible he doesn’t even see the cameras, considering he only seems to have eyes for Adam, who leads him to the podium overflowing with microphones. They’re holding hands so tightly Mark’s own fingers ache in sympathy.

Caleb’s knuckles are all healed up, but there’s a mess of IV marks across both arms.

The rest of the gang — Mark and Sam and Joan and Chloe and Frank — are huddled in a loose circle at the back of the room, almost all dead on their feet from weeks of worry and sleepless nights. When Caleb answers the first reporter’s question, he’s looking back at the five of them.

“Of course I was scared,” he says, “but I knew my family would get me out.”

(It’s so goddamn saccharine that Mark nearly gags on it.)

**Author's Note:**

> I'm DetectiveJoan and you can come yell at me on [tumblr](http://detectivejoan.tumblr.com/) if you want


End file.
